drupalcon

The obvious topic for the March newsletter is the DrupalCon, of course. There are over 800 people here, though and we need to recruit people to write up their favorite session/s. If you are at the conference, please write up at least one session, and/or find three other people who can write up a session. We only need a paragraph or two, but feel free to write up a whole big article if you're inspired.

This DrupalCon has been phenomenal! We had an impromptu BoF session yesterday for the Drupal Newsletter. The three big things that came out of that were a plan for March's newsletter, the newsletter length, and building a stand-alone site for the newsletter.

The obvious topic for the March newsletter is the DrupalCon, of course. There are over 800 people here, though and we need to recruit people to write up their favorite session/s. If you are at the conference, please write up at least one session, and/or find three other people who can write up a session. We only need a paragraph or two, but feel free to write up a whole big article if you're inspired.

To the second item, we plan to use a system of teasers for the next issue. We'll put each section and/or article in the groups, and just link a manually created teaser in the digest that gets e-mailed and posted on d.o. We'll refine that process as we continue creating future newsletters.

Which is yet another strong case for a stand-alone newsletter site, bringing us to the third item of discussion. We created a working group, currently consisting of Alex UA, mlsamualson, and myself, to create a proof-of-concept stand-alone site. You can see it at http://drupal-newsletter.org/issue/2008/01 (which is just filler, as you'll see).

I plan to do a better write-up for the Drupal Newsletter, so you'll have to wait till then to hear more about it. However, I did manage to sneak in quick 20 minutes during the panel and write Embedded Media Field support for Tudou.com, the Chinese version of YouTube. As a side-note, tudou translates roughly to 'soil tofu', or 'potato'.

You can see a higher-res version of the video at Jacob's blog wiredgeek.com.

Now the way I am at these conferences is that I get into overdrive. I already spend my 8 hours a day at work buried in Drupal, and an additional 8-10 hours a week of my personal time. But, apart from periodically calling my partner & daughter to let them know I'm still alive and remember them fondly ;), I spend every waking moment at a Drupal conference thinking about Drupal, how it can "save the world", and how I can do my bit to help that happen. I find myself so energized by being around other like-minded people at these events, that I throw myself into making cool modules, upgrading other cool modules, etc.

I know I'm not the only one like that.

Since the word of the day is "Drupal 6", I'm curious who else is going to be working on porting their modules during DrupalCon. So I did a 5 minute google right now on "upgrade drupal 6 drupalcon" and found nothing there. But I know it'll happen. Either folks are keeping it under wrap, are too busy to blog about it, or don't realize yet that that's what they're going to do. (Time for me to brush up on the Coder module...)

Whatever the case, March 10 should be an exciting day in the world of Contributed Modules. I'd put money on some of your favorite modules being ready for d6 the week after the conference (maybe not deployment-ready, but certainly testing-ready). And I wouldn't be surprised to see a quiet module or two come out of the conference that will rock the world of Drupal, and send waves through the Internet.

So I had a dream last night. About Drupal, as I often do. I envisioned a way to make Embedded Media Import, which is bundled with Embedded Media Field, far more useful than it currently is. And I don't think it'll be too difficult to implement either.

I plan to work on this at DrupalCon, if anyone's interested. Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg and I plan to do some work towards updating the module to Drupal 6 at that time anyway.

emImport currently works by pasting the URL of a playlist, currently only from Flickr, but easy enough to implement for other providers such as YouTube, into a text field. You are then presented with a screen of captured media, with checkboxes, to import them as nodes, complete with titles, descriptions, media, and tags.

The next step is to allow this to automatically aggregrate playlists. In my dream, it was a new module, which I dubbed Embedded Media Aggregrator. However, after thinking about it this morning, I think it would be better to simply integrate that into emImport. In either case, the functionality would simply be built on top of what's already there.

I will be the lead presenter of the Drupal Multimedia panel at Boston DrupalCon next week. I am teaming up with James Walker (walkah), Darrel O'Pry (dopry), and Nate Haug (quicksketch) on Monday, March 3, in the Site Building track, with a live demonstration integrating images, video, and audio onto your sites.